" RESULTS: The national rape-related pregnancy rate is 5.0% per rape among victims of reproductive age (aged 12 to 45); among adult women an estimated 32,101 pregnancies result from rape each year. Among 34 cases of rape-related pregnancy, the majority occurred among adolescents and resulted from assault by a known, often related perpetrator."
That’s awful and I in no way mean to diminish the suffering of those adolescents attacked by a known and probably trusted person, but reasonable people can agree 34 people in a nation of 333 million is an anomaly.
IF you believed that every fetus was a human deserving of life at this point you’d site Planned Parenthood statistics for abortions for any reason which far exceed 34 people a year. Liberty begins with body ownership so I am pro-choice to the core, my point was both sides use the ‘think about the children!’ whenever it suits them even on opposing sides of the same topic.
I’ve quoted the whole abstract from @Kimstu’s link to give context.
I would read it as 34 cases out of 4008 study subjects. If that accurately scales up it would mean (34 rape-related pregnancies / 4008 subjects) * 166,500,000 American women = about 1,400,000 in the US.
Is that how you read it? Do you think there were a total of 34 rape-related pregnancies in the US in 3 years?
?? Whoa, I’m pretty sure that doesn’t say what you’re interpreting it as saying. AFAICT the study is talking about the 34 cases of rape-related pregnancy that occurred in the study sample of several thousand subjects. Not claiming that there are only 34 cases of rape-related pregnancy in the whole nation per year.
[ETA: as 74westy explained better, I gotta read all the new posts before replying.]
I assume the problem there is that the study looked at women 12-45 and you looked at the population of ALL women. Although ISTM that we’d still be off by an order of magnitude or two?
I apologize for my error. I does not scale up, probably for the reasons you stated. I still think 32,101 each year or about 96,000 in the three years of the study is significant.
I think what Irishman was saying was that the particular worrisome “low hanging fruit of consequences” you described doesn’t actually happen, at least not to any significant extent. There are (very small numbers of) trans kids playing sports, but there isn’t a detectable incidence of cis boys just pretending to be trans and putting on a skirt so they can win the girls’ league.
As discussed in the foregoing posts, there are, in reality, at the very least, thousands of incest-derived pregnancies annually in the US. Even if there were only 34, as you incorrectly estimated, that would still be a hell of a lot more than the real-life instances of boys “putting on a skirt” to “shatter records” in girls’ leagues.
That’s fair. I will concede the point. It seems likely to me incest rape babies are more common than teens choosing a different gender identity in order to succeed in sports.
That’s a bit of a straw man. You can be fully on board with trans rights and with viewing trans people as the gender they identify as, and also have different opinions on what the best way to both be inclusion be of trans people and ensure that competitive events remain fair.
A trans girl who underwent male puberty before transitioning will have certain biological advantages in sports regardless of whether she truly identifies as a woman or not.
To be clear, I doubt that “teens choosing a different gender to compete in order to compete in sports” has ever happened. Maybe you could find a handful of cases inspired by Republican paranoia on the topic.
Trans teens who are Trans for the same reasons that anyone else is Trans do exist and play sports, though, and the question of which team is appropriate in which situation is valid.
The link text for that cite was “rape pregnancy rate of about 5%” so I assumed that the purpose of the cite was to verify that. I can’t blame it for not verifying some other proposition that I assume was in the link for the text “Almost half of all child rape victims in the US were raped by a family member.”
I don’t know what the number 34 has to do with either.
Hold on, who are you accusing of straw-manning here? Because, “Boys will pretend to be girls just to win at sports” is absolutely something that transphobes have pushed as a reason to oppose trans rights in general.
If someone is “fully on board with trans rights,” but still has concerns over trans people in sports, its important to understand that that person has been duped by anti-trans activists into worrying about a problem that doesn’t exist. “How do we incorporate trans people into sports,” was a solved problem before this latest round of anti-trans political hysteria. Most major sporting organizations already had policies in place to address the situation, and there have been no instances of a trans athlete dominating a sport - the few trans athletes who are successful in their sport are still well within the performance bands we see from cis athletes. Lia Thompson, the college swimmer that transphobes love to trot out as an example of unfair advantage in sports, won a swim meet with times that were significantly slower than the winning time from the previous year, and slower than the winning time from the next year. She won because she happened to compete in a year where her event had a particularly weak field, not because she had some massive advantage from being born male.
“But male puberty,” is another bit of anti-trans rhetoric designed for consumption by well meaning cis people who aren’t personally phobic, but aren’t really informed on the issue. The truth is, the advantages of male puberty are almost completely wiped out by the disadvantages of being on HRT, and the few that remain are well within the range of physical variation found among cis women.
Really, the entire subject of trans people in sports is a misdirect. The percentage of trans people who are athletes is miniscule, and the percentage of athletes who are trans is even smaller. The extent to which it dominates discussions of trans rights out of proportion to its actual effects on society is a deliberate ploy to make anti-trans positions seem more reasonable to people who aren’t already predisposed to hate trans people.
The post being responded to was about Trans teens who play sports, not about people pretending to be trans to win sports. I think there are trans teens who play sports; I don’t think there are non trans teens pretending to be trans to win at sports.
I’m very confused, because these two quotes completely contradict each other.
As you point out in the second quote, most sport organizations have policies on place that ensure fairness, and those policies vary by sport, as you’d expect. Clearly, someone put thought into these policies, doing the work to figure out the proper way for trans athletes to compete.
But you then say that anyone who thought this was an issue worthy of consideration is being duped by transphobes.
Are you saying that the people who put these rules into place at these varying sport organizations are duped by transphobes? I assume you don’t, since you seem supportive of the frameworks they’ve come up with; but you also claim that anyone who thinks about these things is “duped by anti-trans activists”.
…and that’s something that should be discussed, isn’t it? So sports organizations can say “you can compete in women’s sports based on these and these hormone levels, these and these treatments, etc”, whatever is appropriate to the particular sport?
I don’t understand how you can say “there is a framework for handling this issue” and also “thinking about this issue means you are falling for a transphobic ploy”. These frameworks obviously exist because (presumably non transphobic) people spent the time to look at the evidence and decide what makes sense, and - like any other set of rules - we should continue to think about them, to ensure that they still meet the standards and accomplish the goals we have for society.
Even in the trans community, it doesn’t seem like the matter is settled. Some people want self-identification to be the only criteria for gender across the board. That applies to sports and everything. If something says it’s for a gender, then it’s for anyone who identifies as that gender. Stuff like HRT or medical procedures shouldn’t be a requirement. I can see the point in that position. Why do some women have to be on HRT in order to play women’s sports while others don’t? And why are the only athletes that HRT applies to are trans athletes? It seems discriminatory against transgender people.
For sports, I think we still need a solution for the entire range of trans athletes. I don’t get the sense that transgender people are united behind conforming HRT being a requirement for trans athletes. We need a solution that not only works for someone who has been on puberty blockers and HRT from a young age, but also for someone who was much older when they came out as transgender and has no interest on any kind of medical intervention, HRT or otherwise. How should sports like swimming handle both the trans woman swimmer who is on HRT and the trans woman swimmer who is not (and never will be)?
No matter is ever settled if the criteria is a uniform opinion across all members. I wager the push for self-id is primarily at the high school and collegiate level where participation in sports is primarily for social and inclusion reasons. Numerically, very few people play sports for meaningful competitive stakes and most trans people are supportive of reasonable more stringent requirements there but also view it as a sideshow and distraction deliberately ginned up by transphones to smuggle anti-trans talking points.
No, I said that anyone who thinks this is currently an issue has been duped by transphobes, because the issue has already been considered, and guidelines put in place to ensure that competition remains fair. And we can see that these guidelines work, because of the general absence of any trans athletes absolutely dominating their sport. Like I said in the first bit you quoted - it’s a solved problem, not an ongoing problem.
Yes, pointing to children who are raped and then got pregnant from it, which is largely from incest, is a special category of pregnancy, and it is used to highlight the extremity of the anti-abortion issue. It’s also a real category that affects real lives.
The issue for pro-choice supporters is trying to convince someone who does not define the biology or ethics the same that the ramifications of anti-abortion lead to areas even they agree are bad. Dying 11 year old girls is a pretty hard to refute argument.
The flipside is trans-teenagers. The argument that “boys are playing in girls’ sports” is not aimed at convincing opponents of the issue. I mean, there might be run for legitimate concern for girls competing fairly against trans-girls who have had male hormones or are not on hormone blockers. But the argument isn’t framed from that perspective.
It takes the position of the trans-deniers as the framework to make the argument. Thus, it’s more about mocking the opponents’s position by denying their position.
“Boys in girl sports” is a strawman.
Are there trans teens competing? Yes. But there aren’t boys lining up for the chance to dominate in wrestling by calling themselves a girl.
And in fact, the opposite has happened. T-boys on hormones
forced to compete in the girls division, and dominating. That only happens when your concern isn’t girls having fair competition, it’s when you force students to compete as their birth gender.
That’s also relevant to intersex female athletes, i.e., women who were assigned female at birth due to female genital anatomy, grew up female, and continue to identify as female, but found at some point that they had some kind of difference of sex development, including XY chromosomes and some more male-typical physiological features.
Those women, such as Olympic runners Caster Semenya and (I think) Dutee Chand, have been required to undergo hormone therapy to be allowed to compete against other women, on the grounds that their testosterone level is too high or something. That’s an issue especially because, unlike many transgender women, intersex women generally aren’t trying to further “feminize” their bodies, so they wouldn’t be taking female hormones at all if they weren’t forced to as a condition of competition.
If a transgender woman voluntarily goes on HRT as part of her gender transition process, it seems reasonable to expect that she’ll maintain that status for sports competition with other women as well. But there’s no such argument for forcing an AFAB intersex woman to use physiology-altering medications that she’s never chosen to take and doesn’t want to take, just to maintain her sports eligibility.
It’s not a simple issue, but yeah, the people who need to be figuring it out are medical professionals and sports competition organizations, not a bunch of moral-panic merchants waving signs.
The overall rape rate for women of reproductive age (12 to 45) is 5.0%.
An estimated 32,101 pregnancies from rape occur among adult women.
12 to 18 is not adult women. So 32,000 occur from 18 to 45. How many occur from 12 to 18?
The majority of rape related pregnancies occurred among adolescents and resulted from assault by a known, often related perpetrator.
Adult women had 32,000, and minors had the majority. That means at minimum, minors had 32,000 rape related pregnancies.
That is 64,000 rape related pregnancies a year if 50% are adolescents.
That’s a very rough back of envelope calculation, but it’s closer to what the numbers mean based on the descriptions given.
Regardless of actual numbers, I think it safe to say 32,000 rape related pregnancies in adult women is significant, and a similar number in adolescents is significant, enough that it is a national concern and not just a discussion device.
Now that we agree the issue of incest pregnancy is nothing like trans teens in sports, let’s drop pregnancy and abortion from this thread unless we start talking about trans teens getting abortions to act out.